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I unpacked my wife’s avatar on a smoggy Beijing morning. She lay naked on the floor of our apartment, her hair fanned out and mingling with the packing peanut afterbirth that had spilled from the box. Not quite the reunion I expected. It was a near perfect replica of Claire: her muscular frame honed from […]
In the winter of 19–, having newly arrived in England, and still recovering from the nervous indisposition which had afflicted me greatly ever since my circumstances during the war, I responded to an advertisement placed in the Yorkshire Post, for the position of caretaker in an old, near-abandoned Elizabethan mansion called Wildfell Hall. Who in […]
Once upon a time there was a man who built two enormous machines, and he loved them very much. He called them Brother and Sister and programmed them with intelligences that woke and stretched and tested the limits of their metal bodies. When they did not like those limits, they altered them, nanite scurrying over […]
(Content note: domestic violence/murder) It is said that Archimedes was asked by the King of Syracuse to authenticate a manuscript. King Hiero had received what purported to be Alexander of Macedon’s own copy of the Iliad, brought out from the Library at Alexandria itself. He sent envoys to Egypt to ask whether Alexander’s Iliad had […]
The anchorage appeared on my radar screen as a blip, a blotch, one bit of detritus among many. The accompanying message was gentle but persistent, an invitation repeated on loop for anyone who might pick it up: visit if you like. The politest distress call in the universe. Visit if you like, and please bring […]
1704 Tsardom of Muscovy Ibrahim watched as Tsar Pyotr of the Russians was seated into a wooden chair in front of a fireplace. It was made for a very big man, with a high back and curved arms carved like lions. And the Tsar was certainly big, taller than any of the other men […]
The Summer King fell in love with the Winter Queen before they even met. He dwelt in the heart of summer in bursts of fruit and green, a place the denizens of winter did not and could not even consider approaching. But even in summer, tales were told of her stark beauty, of her penchant […]
Night. A night like any other in Starhollow: the headlights of cars, small and lost between the skyscrapers; the smell of hydromel and wine wafting from those few bars still open; and above me, the distant light of the stars, a constant reminder of the inaccessibility of Heaven. I climbed the stairs to my flat, […]
Sillage de la Reine: A bright top note of orange blossom, intertwined heart notes of rose and jasmine, and a trio of warm base notes of sandalwood, iris, and cedar. Laughter in the gardens of Versailles. “Astound me, Monsieur Fargeon,” the queen says. She laughs, showing all of her pretty teeth. She is not wearing […]
We stop at the gas station in the desert, the last one for a hundred miles. Kaia grabs a Coke from the refrigerator case, twists the cap, drinks half of it right there with the door still open, the artificial chill rolling over her sweaty skin. I stand in the snack aisle and watch her. […]
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